Stalin

Sex and Stalin: You don't often associate the two. This goes to show you how decidedly offbeat the oddball Australian social comedy Children of the Revolution is. Rookie writer-director Peter Duncan sends up left-wing fanaticism with the story of a communist firebrand who bears the Soviet dictator's love child. In Duncan's snickeringly cynical yarn, ideological idealism waxes and wanes, but the will to power remains depressingly constant. Judy Davis is a whip-smart hoot as Joan Fraser, a Sydney party stalwart whose hysterical devotion to proletarianism is undeterred by the disinterest of others.

Russia's President Dmitri Medvedev worries that Russians have lost their sense of horror over Stalin's purges. He is calling for the construction of museums and memorial centers devoted to the atrocities, as well as further efforts to unearth and identify the dead. Medvedev made the comments on his video blog on Friday, on the occasion of a holiday devoted to the memory of victims of repression. He warned that revisionist historians risked glossing over the darker passages of the Soviet past, citing a poll that showed that 90 percent of young people could not name victims of the purges.

By OLGA ANDREYEV CARLISLE Special to the Los Angeles Times, May 1, 1994

THE UNQUIET GHOST: Russians Remember Stalin. By Adam Hochschild. Viking. $22.95. 304 pp. Western readers may wonder why we should be led once again through the cemeteries of the Russian Revolution. Hasn't Robert Conquest shown us the Great Purges? Alexander Solzhenitsyn the Gulag Archipelago? Nadezhda Mandelstam the plight of the intellectual under Lenin and Stalin? What is left in the '90s for an American writer, an outsider, to see and to report? The answer is in the absorbing pages of The Unquiet Ghost, in the narrow window of time available to the Stalinist reign of terror.

Alexander Solzhenitsyn, the dissident Russian writer and Nobel laureate whose portrayals of Josef Stalin's labor camps and political oppression helped undermine the Soviet grip on power, died Sunday. He was 89. Mr. Solzhenitsyn revealed to the Western world the inner workings of the gulag, the network of prisons and camps that held as many as 20 million people during Stalin's reign of terror and killed at least 1.5 million. He became a thorn in the side of Soviet authorities and was an icon for Russian intellectuals, helping trigger the demise of the communist regime with his calls for social conscience and historical justice.

WASHINGTON -- Louisiana`s efforts to force its schools to teach creationism "recall in some ways the situation in the Soviet Union under Stalin," a Nobel laureate in physics says in a commentary in February`s Omni magazine. Murray Gell-Mann, professor of physics at the California Institute of Technology and winner of the Nobel prize in physics in 1969, is one of 72 Nobel recipients who filed a friend-of-the-court brief last year with the Supreme Court opposing Louisiana`s creationism law. The Supreme Court heard arguments this term on a bid by Louisiana to overturn lower court rulings that threw out the law, but the high court has not yet issued a ruling.

Spend half a day at Public School No. 4 here in the center of post-Soviet Georgia and it becomes a little clearer how an old way of life is dying and a new way is taking root. Georgia's school system is collapsing. Better to say it has collapsed. There has not been electricity in this three-story building for 12 years. The indoor temperature hovers around 40 degrees. Wood-burning stoves have been added but the wood supply is limited -- the whole country is cutting down the forests. The judo instructor splits wood between classes.

After years of fruitless searching, investigators for a prominent human rights organization have uncovered what they believe to be one of the major killing fields of Josef Stalin's Great Terror of the 1930s at a military firing range outside St. Petersburg. Volunteers digging at the site discovered human bones last month and have since turned up more than 50 burial pits, each believed to contain dozens of bodies. Human rights workers said the initial discoveries might validate their long-held suspicion that the Rzhevsk artillery range was turned into a mass grave containing the bodies of 30,000 men, women and children.

The Sunrise mayor and city commissioners have littered the streets of Sunrise with 5 x 6 foot wooden signs showing their titles and names. What a pathetic program! Lenin, Stalin and Hussein did it better: They erected statues.

Your July 4 Editorial Page was classic. At the bottom, a letter writer rightly describes Chan Lowe's Hitler/Stalin "cartoon" regarding "transfer of money by terrorists," as despicable. At the top of the same page is another Lowe cartoon, this one depicting an Arabian oil baron "transferring money to a terrorist." Unlike the Hitler/Stalin example, even political cartoons should have a little humor. The second cartoon does allow a laugh, but only because we can laugh at Lowe, and not with him.

In his commentary on the Federal Reserve, Boston Globe columnist Thomas Oliphant displays an astounding ignorance of economics and Robert Reich's record as an economic analyst. He characterized Reich as a "chronically creative thinker, the Clinton administration at its best." In his book, The Resurgent Liberal (1990), Reich stated that "Stalin's economic organization was remarkably successful. Stalin converted Russian surplus capacity to efficient industrial capacity." It is not without reason that George Melloan, Wall Street Journal columnist wrote (Oct.

Nikolai K. Baibakov, who oversaw Russian oil production during World War II and went on to become one of the Soviet Union's top economic officials, died on Monday in Moscow. He was 97. His death was announced by Gazprom, the Russian natural gas giant. In an interview with Petroleum Economist in 1998, Mr. Baibakov remembered being summoned to meet with Stalin on a hot day in July 1942. Hitler was advancing to the Caucasus to try to seize the strategically essential oil fields near Baku.

The Sunrise mayor and city commissioners have littered the streets of Sunrise with 5 x 6 foot wooden signs showing their titles and names. What a pathetic program! Lenin, Stalin and Hussein did it better: They erected statues.

Let's get out of Iraq now. When we leave, the Iraqi forces will have to unite against Iran. They are their worst enemy. We should help them with all our equipment. Remember that the Russians hated Stalin but they fought for their country. This is called "nationalism" and I am sure this will happen. Let's not debate anymore; our brave troops are dying every day. Democrats, this war is lost, just cut off the funds. They lie that we are not supporting the troops.

Dictator Style: Lifestyles of the World's Most Colorful Despots. Peter York, forward by Douglas Coupland. Chronicle. $24.95. Dictator Style is a strange book that turns on a strange conceit. Not only are the despots profiled as horrible people, the author contends they had horrible taste. As the dust jacket reads, "absolute power corrupts absolutely, right down to the drapes." In the forward, Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland relates that when he was a teenager, he saw a picture of Moammar Gadhafi's master bedroom in a news magazine.

Our sitting president, in this time of world turbulence, had the opportunity to discuss important differences with the president of Iran, but flunked. He acted as a child in that he refused to meet with him, and they were so close, a hallway across. President Franklin Roosevelt sat down with Stalin, didn't he, to discuss world problems? President Bush sits in the same White House, but they are worlds apart in understanding the times that they are in. Pity us, the poor Americans who have to endure this man until 2009.

I am in total agreement with the Aug. 10 letter, "What price free speech?" It seems to me that the basic foundation of this country is being eroded on a daily basis. Looking at recent events, I see the immigration debate, Israel and politicians who throw around the word "racism" as if it were a political tool. When illegal aliens marched down our streets carrying Mexican flags, those who wanted justice and respect for the rule of law were called racists. Don't get me wrong, I'd love all illegal aliens deported in a heartbeat, but is it my fault that so many come from Latin America and particularly Mexico?

Russia's President Dmitri Medvedev worries that Russians have lost their sense of horror over Stalin's purges. He is calling for the construction of museums and memorial centers devoted to the atrocities, as well as further efforts to unearth and identify the dead. Medvedev made the comments on his video blog on Friday, on the occasion of a holiday devoted to the memory of victims of repression. He warned that revisionist historians risked glossing over the darker passages of the Soviet past, citing a poll that showed that 90 percent of young people could not name victims of the purges.

A handshake is a handshake is a handshake. Much has been said about the famous Arafat-Rabin handshake. There have been some other famous handshakes which did not prove to be very successful. The Hitler-Chamberlain Munich handshake resulted in "Peace in our Time" for a few months. Stalin and Hitler shook hands by remote control before the start of World War II. That handshake lasted until Hitler attacked the Soviet Union. The Stalin-Roosevelt-Churchill Yalta handshake laid the seeds for the Cold War. It would be prudent to cool the euphoria and calmly follow the meetings and the events in the Middle East.

"I'm getting on a plane and going to Miami," my mom blurted. I happened to be visiting my parents in Texas when word of Fidel Castro's supposed intestinal surgery -- and transfer of power to his brother Raul -- reached us. It came via my niece, a generation removed from Cuba, who excitedly phoned Monday night: "Turn on the TV. Castro's given up power." It was news my parents had been waiting almost half a century to hear. Before the words were out of her mouth, we were flipping through CNN, Fox, MSNBC, Univision.

Your July 4 Editorial Page was classic. At the bottom, a letter writer rightly describes Chan Lowe's Hitler/Stalin "cartoon" regarding "transfer of money by terrorists," as despicable. At the top of the same page is another Lowe cartoon, this one depicting an Arabian oil baron "transferring money to a terrorist." Unlike the Hitler/Stalin example, even political cartoons should have a little humor. The second cartoon does allow a laugh, but only because we can laugh at Lowe, and not with him.